Collective processes of moving-thinking with the Dommelhof forest and building a concentrated space for encounters between human and more-than-human have been fermenting into an opening. The guided silent walk through the ‘encounter portal’ will be waiting for its audience on April 10, 17 and 24 at 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm. In the foyer of Dommelhof visitors can experience the live archive showing the continuous work flow of the long-term project HALL33 by TAAT.

More information (in Dutch)

Live archive of TAAT

I am happy to announce that my artistic research piece ‘Holobiont Tales’ is featured in Migrant Journal No.5: Micro Odysseys!

By exploring our microbial identities and how they challenge our view on individuality, I gathered saliva samples and interviewed six international artists while participating in a collective symposium in Southern Estonia.

Obsessed by the movements of humans, the ‘big picture’ and the mega-infrastructure that make their circulation possible, we forget that every great journey has its origin below the radar. The planetary and the microscopic are not necessarily in opposition—life is but a flow of minerals. Disease, seeds, plants, fauna have travelled the world, and back again, echoing humanity’s stories of exploration, exploitation and colonisation.

In this fifth and penultimate issue, we explore the microscopic in movement: from shooting stars to shifting sands, bacteria in Estonia and particles in Geneva, mosquitoes in fascist Italy and tuberculosis in Indian cities, micro-plastics floating in the Pacific Ocean, Roman weeds and their mysterious migration to Copenhagen.

— image and above text from the website of Migrant Journal: https://migrantjournal.com

Moving through the text fragments collected by Lisa van Casand as a landscape, I was commissioned by oneacre.online to compose an instructed audio walk as an additional layer to the online publication and a guide for the audience.

Meaning Seeking Animals explores the possibility of a publication as a world, it is a personal collection of digested knowledge that keeps on growing as the artist proceeds to make new work. It is a world, or an aura, a field where the artist’s internal experience of knowledge building has been deposited, for a long while privately and now made public. The diverse collection of excerpts and fragments combines sources from biology, philosophy, art and psychology grows and forms as a terra under the thoughtful care of Lisa van Casand.

The publication could be thought along the more traditional or familiar notions of a captain’s diary, notebook, or log — but as a collection of knowledge it is much closer to how Walter Benjamin envisioned the dream world “an autonomous world of dreams circling the earth at night”. Upon arrival the publication gives no specific reading direction, no middle and no end. But like a topographical map it offers a guide for locating positions, or intersections, in the form of audio-walks provided by artist Marit Mihklepp, theorist Aleid de Jong and geographer Jacob Knegtel.

— text and digital landscape by oneacre.online.

For a week in July 2018, we gathered in Biella and Oasi Zegna protected Alpine mountain area in Italy for a shared expedition about time for the living and non-living, mentored by Italian artist duo Raffaella Spagna and Andrea Caretto. I was studying the possibilities of releasing fossil sounds from the geologic matter and collaborating with stones to tune human senses to the immense scale of deep time.

What is Time? How do we perceive the flow of Time and what is our relationship with it? What is Time for a plant? How can we approach the Deep Time of rocks? What is the relationship between the Time of machines, of human beings and natural cycles? What is free Time? What is Time for contemporary physics?

— from the website of Cittadellarte: http://www.cittadellarte.it/unidee/activity.html?id=102

After spending two weeks in May 2018 a residency at MoKS artist-run project space in beautiful Southern Estonia, I worked with trees, video and sound recording to create a short video ‘Tree Reader’ which was presented in the group exhibition ‘WILD/METSIK’, curated by Evelyn and John Grzinich.

Inspired by the earliest entirely mechanic recording devices and gramophones, I used a simple paper cone to amplify the sound of the textures of the tree barks. When turned the other way around, the cone works as an intensifier for the eye.

Wild is a frame for self-reflection, from understanding one’s thinking and behavioral habits to discovering new roles in forms of social and cultural engagement. Wild is an exercise in observing the subtle transition zones between human activity and plant and animal habitats, from spaces of civilized management to the wilding areas of abandonment, ruins and forgotten cultivation slowly fading into the ever evolving perma-forest of life.

— text by curators Evelyn and John Grzinich

‘On Becoming a Fossil (conversations with matter)’ is the second piece growing out from the first conversations with stones during my residency in Salzburger Kunstverein. I wanted to highlight the space of potential in time scales beyond human and was driven by curiosity of experimenting with and finding ways of co-existence between humans and non-humans, or stones and non-stones. This piece is a subtle invitation into the geologic time through the tactile investigation and poetic instructions, giving the audience space to bodily and/or imaginatively experience the shared choreographies between more and less alive bodies.

‘On Becoming a Fossil (conversations with matter)’ was shown together with ‘The Longest Movie Ever Made’ in an exhibition ‘Performance Objects Bodies’ curated by Matteo Marangoni (iii) in Quartair (The Hague, NL: 15.09-07.10.2017) and in TETEM (Enschede, NL: 16.11.2017-28.01.2018).

Marking the beginning of my love story with stones, this video of endless turning of stones was made during a residency in Salzburger Kunstverein and presented in an exhibition ‘Performance Objects Bodies’ curated by Matteo Marangoni (iii) in Quartair (The Hague, NL) and in TETEM (Enschede, NL).